Dubliners

Fifteen stories of Dublin lives that stop short of the moment when something might change, ending with the snow falling over Ireland in The Dead. Joyce spent nine years getting the book into print: one publisher set the type and then burned the sheets rather than risk the references to real shops and a dead king. Nothing in it is invented much. Ninety-nine plates by painters including Walter Osborne and Edvard Munch follow the same Dublin interiors and waiting figures the stories hold still.